This impassioned email was written by Norma Field, Professor of East Asian Languages Emeritus, University of Chicago. She is an activist, and a friend of CAPA, who focuses on nuclear disarmament.
Would you consider contributing to someone sentenced to 70 years in a trial with alarming implications for our whole society? I’m referring to Maricela Rueda, one of the “Prairieland Defendants” arrested after a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas on July 4th last year. They wanted to express support for the 700 or so immigrant detainees held there in brutal conditions. The FBI touted this as its first “antifa” domestic terrorism case, well before Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis were labeled “domestic terrorists.”
Let me say a word about why I’m asking you to pay attention to a single person when the state of our society distresses us every day and implores us to take some form of action. I’ve often had to acknowledge that as infuriating and frightening as this regime has been, my family and I, so far, and mostly as a matter of luck, have occupied a relatively protected place. I “met” Maricela in a small zoom meeting a year ago in the spring, with her daughter. Through her long-standing friendship with my old friend Adrienne Hurley (Montreal), I got to know quite a bit about Maricela and her family, enough to have a strong sense of her as a person. It’s been a startling education to learn how someone like her, a “doula, artist, poet, and beloved mother to her 12-year-old daughter” (the words of the organization newly taking on her defense), can be snatched from her life, thrown in jail, without counsel for month after month since the public defender who had been assigned her refused to visit her. That she can be forced to clean her cell wall of feces left by the previous prisoner with her bare hands to the taunts of her guards; that she can be shackled; subjected to strip searches without warning, sometimes several times a day; deprived of a tablet so she can communicate with the outside world; moved to different parts of the state without warning, making it difficult for her sister, a busy nurse, to travel with her young daughter for visits. More recently, after her sentencing, a clinical social worker asked Maricela inappropriate questions about whether she and the other defendants had plans for appeal. When Maricela asked to speak to a lawyer, the social worker (Joy White) started threatening her and said, “You’re not going to be calling anyone. You’re going to be naked in a padded cell for 4 days.” Since then, Maricela is being subjected to multiple strip searches a day, leg and hand shackles, and segregation (solitary confinement).
The “Prairieland Defendants” have gotten a fair amount of media coverage after the astonishing federal sentences, but if I hadn’t felt a connection to Maricela, I might have left it as another dismaying event in an overwhelming landscape. But now I know more and can’t let it go. Maricela is someone who acted upon her dismay with society with generosity of time and spirit. Not all of us can or are prepared to do that. For that, she’s being punished in a way that effectively robs her of her freedom for most of her life. She and her fellow defendants are being made examples of through new use of terrorism charges meant to intimidate all of us from exercising our first amendment rights.
These days, I often think about all the serious structural problems we need not only to be aware of but to actually address (mostly, I’m focused on nuclear issues, which, with deregulation, involve even more hurt for all of us) while at the same time, not forgetting to recognize the person in front of us (on the sidewalk, for instance), whom we can actually help in the moment. Maricela is the person standing in front of me now. It’s also the case that by learning about her, I’m encountering features of our prison system that had managed to escape me, and what they say about our society.
SUCH a long email already! I want to give you more information, but for those of you who’ve read so far but don’t have time or patience for more (I get that), thank you. I appreciate your knowing something about Maricela and this case. If you like, here are three possible actions you can take:
(1) Write a letter to Maricela to express support for her and also to show the authorities that lots of people care about her. (Instructions at bottom–how you write to someone in jail is already revealing)
(2) Donate to her Go-fund-me campaign to support her family:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-maricelas-family-while-she-fights-for-justice (You don’t have to leave a tip. Go-fund-me already takes a percentage of what’s donated; I’ve learned that there are platforms that don’t do this, such as Chuffed.org.)
(3) About the treatment inflicted on her following her exchange with clinical social worker Joy White that I touched on above, call the Jail admin and ask to leave a message for Captain Gordy protesting Maricela’s treatment and ask that she be moved out of segregation to general population. 817-556-602; email your message to JUDGEBOEDEKER@JOHNSONCOUNTYTX.ORG.
Instructions for writing to Maricela Rueda
•Include her first and last name as well as ID number, page numbers, date, and a return address at the top of EACH sheet.
•All addresses must be formatted as follows and should include a return address:
Johnson County Jail, TX
Maricela Rueda, 202502018
P.O. Box 247
Phoenix, MD 21131
It’s possible she could be moved at any time. In that case the letter will be returned and you can resend it to her new location (this will be the situation for a while – people are often moved without notice and for seemingly no reason).
•You can type and print out letters (no colored ink). Handwritten letters must be written in blue or black ink – no stickers, glitter, etc.
•ONE side of the sheet only. Leave generous margins so that nothing is cut off when scanned.
•If you don’t know what to write, a short note about a pet, flowers, or a favorite poem would be perfect. Or drawings–plants, animals, beaches, mountains. Imagine how you’re deprived in so many dimensions if you’re in a jail cell–not to mention if you’re in solitary.) Or you can just say that you’ve learned about her situation, that it makes you angry, and that you care about her. If you decide to send or include a drawing, it must also be in black or blue ink. Don’t forget to put ID information on drawings, too, if they take up their own sheet.
She will receive the scanned message on a tablet. Imprisoned people are even robbed of the tactile pleasure of fingering the paper, tracing the handwriting of a precious message.
Everything you write will be read by jail staff and unspecifiable others.
Maricela needs lots of support right now, to feel that even people she doesn’t know can grasp her warm, generous, and principled character and are cheering for her. Flooding her with letters would also send a concrete message to jail staff of the support she has. And let’s hope, improve her condition.
That’s all!